‘You told me you didn’t want a relationship.’
‘You didn’t tell me you were already in one.’ As soon as she said this her expression closed, as if she felt she had given too much away. But I knew what she had felt. I had rerun that moment in the car as if it were on a spool tape inside my head. I could have recited word for word what we had said to each other. Then I was reminded of my own duplicity on so many levels, and at that point I usually rang Dennis or found some administrative task to do with the development. That’s the beauty of business: it’s a refuge of myriad practical problems. You always know where you stand with it.
I told Vanessa why I thought the development was no longer right as the plans stood. She didn’t believe me, so I took her out on Moby One with several tourists and showed her the dolphins. Yoshi and Lance were courteous, but I felt an almost physical discomfort at the lack of good-humoured conversation, and I missed Lance’s caustic insults. I was no longer one of them. I knew it and so did they.
That sense of silent disapproval followed me around the bay until I was convinced that even the Korean tourists on the top deck knew what I was responsible for. ‘I might as well stick a harpoon in my hand and label myself “whale-killer”,’ I said, when the silence became too much.
Vanessa told me I was being oversensitive. ‘Why should you care what they think?’ she said. ‘In a few days you’ll never have to see any of them again.’
‘I care because I want to get this right,’ I said. ‘And I think we can get it right. Ethically and commercially.’ I knew it was vital to have Vanessa on side if we were to convince Dennis to alter the plans.
‘Ethical business, eh?’ She raised an eyebrow, but she didn’t write it off as an idea.
Then, as if in answer to my prayers, the seas opened. Yoshi’s voice came over the PA system, lifted with excitement as it always was in the presence of a whale. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said, ‘if you look out of your portside windows – that’s left for those who don’t know – you can just make out a humpback. She might be headed towards us, so we’re going to turn off the engines and hope she comes close.’
There was a swell of excited chatter on the top deck. I pulled my scarf up round my face and pointed to where I’d caught sight of a blow. I watched Vanessa’s face, knowing that this moment might be crucial, praying that the whale would know what was good for it and impress her.
Then, as if on cue, it breached not forty feet away from us, its huge, prehistoric head turning as it splashed back into the water. Like me, she couldn’t help gasping, and her face softened with a child-like joy. For a moment, I saw in her the girl I had loved before I had come here. I took her hand and squeezed it. She squeezed mine back.
‘You see what I mean?’ I said. ‘You see how this is impossible?’
‘But the planning’s going through,’ she said, when she could tear her gaze away. ‘You made it.’
‘I can’t live with myself,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen what can happen and I don’t want to feel responsible for spoiling something here.’
We stood and watched as the whale breached again, further away this time, then disappeared under the waves, no longer diverted by curiosity, compelled to continue its journey north. The tourists around us hung over the rails, hoping it might re-emerge, then drifted back to the plastic chairs and benches, chattering and comparing images on their cameras. I thought of Lance, below us in the cockpit, breathing a sigh of relief at another whale-watching trip successfully completed. Perhaps he and Yoshi would be discussing the animal’s movements, chatting on the radio to the other boats as they worked out where to go next. If Vanessa gets it, I thought, we have a chance of making this thing work.
I stood and let my eyes run 360 degrees around me, taking in the distant coastline, the series of small, uninhabited islands that stood like sentries to the greater expanse of land. Above us birds swooped and dived, and I tried to remember what the crews had previously told me: ospreys, gannets, white-breasted sea eagles. Around us the sea rose and fell, glinting on one side, darker and apparently less amenable on the other. I no longer felt alien out here. Despite their lack of money, their insecure lifestyle and, their diet of cheap biscuits, I envied the whalechasers.
It was then that Vanessa spoke. Her hat was pulled low over her eyes so it was difficult for me to see her face. ‘Mike?’
I turned to her. She was wearing the diamond earrings I had bought her for her thirtieth birthday.
‘I know something’s gone on,’ she said carefully. ‘I know I’ve lost a bit of you. But I’m going to pretend that none of this has happened, I’m going to pretend that you and I are still okay, and that this is some kind of weird reaction to the shock that you’re getting married.’
My heart skipped a beat. ‘Nessa,’ I said, ‘nothing happened—’ but she waved a hand to stop me.
She looked at me, and I hated myself for the hurt in her eyes.
‘I don’t want you to explain,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to feel you have to tell me anything. If you think we can be okay, that you can love me and be faithful to me, I just want us to carry on as we were. I want us to get married, forget this and get on with our lives.’
The engines started up again. I felt the vibrations under my feet and then, as the boat swung round, the wind picked up and Lance started to say something over the PA system so I wasn’t sure if she said anything else.
She turned back to the sea, pulled her collar up round her jaw. ‘Okay?’ she said. And then again: ‘Okay?’
‘Okay,’ I said, and stepped forward. She let me hug her. Like I said, she’s a clever woman, my girlfriend.
In the five days that remained before we travelled back to Sydney, Vanessa and I spent most of our time locked in our room. We were not engaged in the kind of liaison I suspected Kathleen and Liza imagined, but hunched over my laptop, working out how to alter the plans in a way that would satisfy her father and the venture capitalists. It was not an easy task.
‘If we can get the USP, we can crack it,’ she said. I thanked God that she had marketing skills. ‘Without the watersports, the whales are the USP. We just have to work out a way of involving them that isn’t going to alienate all of the whale-watching people. That means not setting up our own operation, which would be my immediate choice. There has to be some other way of making the sea creatures accessible.’ She had got on to the National Parks, and Wildlife people to talk to them about the dolphins, but they had said they wouldn’t encourage tourists to have greater contact with the animals than they already allowed.